Staying Sane
Finding Courage and Compassion in Times of Pure Insanity
The world is in its usual mess. Genocide, poverty, disease, insatiable greed. The corporate media provides an unending stream of the carnage. This, the mainstream media screams, is the condition of mankind. There’s nothing to do but sit back and watch it all unfold. The best you can do to help is to keep allowing your tax dollars to flow to the defense contractors who provide the weapons that keep us safe from the bad guys. Have no compassion for the bad guys. They deserve whatever they get.
The corporate media serves as a barrier to the natural compassion we should feel when hearing of children being blown to bits by bombs. Whether it’s Fox News or Ms-NBC, it doesn’t matter. All mainstream media are cheerleaders for the powerful. The talking heads tell us who the good guys and the bad guys are. Who we should hate and blame for all our woes, and who we should arm to the teeth to defend our “freedom.”
Something inside you doesn’t feel right about the inhumanity of these military actions, but you tamp down that queasy feeling and go along with what you are told. Independent thinking is highly discouraged, and is more and more being punished.
“Most people are convinced that as long as they are not overtly forced to do something by an outside power, their decisions are theirs, and that if they want something, it is they who want it. But this is one of the great illusions we have about ourselves. A great number of our decisions are not really our own but are suggested to us from the outside; we have succeeded in persuading ourselves that it is we who have made the decision, whereas we have actually conformed with expectations of others, driven by the fear of isolation and by more direct threats to our life, freedom, and comfort.”
― Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom
I am thankful that I live in the time of internet, for it is in reading the works of independent journalists and writers, and in watching videos that will never be aired on corporate, commercial networks, that I am able to find the words of those who strive to dig through all the propaganda.
Writers such as Patrick Lawrence, who explains the situation we find ourselves currently experiencing, in his succinct and unique style:
Somewhere during the Cold War decades, American citizens became American consumers and lost track of what it meant to stand for something. In this latter condition, most Americans drifted along under the illusion that disengagement and apathy were defensible, even desirable, or that the world was too complicated to bother about and in any case, it came to a moral blur, everything colored a sort of Graham Greene gray. Well, yes, the CIA deposed Jacobo Árbenz as president of Guatemala, but he imported the Communist threat in our hemisphere. Etc., etc. There is a straight, unmistakable line all the way to, well, yes, Israel is killing civilians in Gaza, including many children and women, but Hamas is a terrorist organization, and Gazans are loyal to it.
The U.S. is indeed a nation of vapid consumers. A nation so brainwashed by omnipresent propaganda, that the majority of our people never reach their full potential as human beings, because they believe that who they are is determined by what they can afford to buy.
“. . . modern man still is anxious and tempted to surrender his freedom to dictators of all kinds, or to lose it by transforming himself into a small cog in the machine, well fed, and well clothed, yet not a free man but an automaton.” Escape from Freedom
Too few of us have become aware that we have to dissect practically everything we read, hear, or watch in order to separate the propaganda from the actual events. And, once our eyes are opened, it becomes more and more difficult to have patience with those around us who simply follow the status quo, no questions asked (or even entertained).
But criticizing and blaming those who are blindly stumbling through life doesn’t lead to positive change. If we’re honest, we will realize that we, too, have blindly followed the status quo at times, instead of confronting the painful realities in life.
“Yet all this bespeaks a dim realization of the truth—the truth that modern man lives under the illusion that he knows what he wants, while he actually wants what he is supposed to want. In order to accept this it is necessary to realize that to know what one really wants is not comparatively easy, as most people think, but one of the most difficult problems any human being has to solve. It is a task we frantically try to avoid by accepting ready-made goals as though they were our own.”
― Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom
We need to find compassion for ourselves in order to do the inner work that allows us to see through all the propaganda. Compassion that allows us to acknowledge our own shortcomings while not getting caught up in self-loathing. Only then can we truly have compassion for others, to move beyond hate and the desire for retaliation, to move towards reconciliation and peace.
This path is often lonely. Most people you meet don’t want to do any inner work to find their true path. Most people choose to follow a leader. That leader can take many forms — a political figure, a religious figure, a Hollywood icon, an army general, a social media influencer, the nation. You may feel alone, but you are not alone:
“Ethical principles stand above the existence of the nation and that by adhering to these principles an individual belongs to the community of all those who share, who have shared, and who will share this belief.”
― Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom
Adhering to moral principles in totally corrupt conditions is trying, but it is the only way to be authentic. The bad guys will often win the battles, because they don’t care about being authentic. Their propaganda provides false promises to gain followers, who they will then trample in their quest for more and more power.
And thus, the world looks like it does right now. A world of the 1% with all the power, and the 99% blindly following their orders.
Until they don’t.
Although the mainstream media puts a negative spin on the protests happening all over the world, the protestors are growing in strength. A new generation of protestors who realize that the American Dream is an unachievable lie; who aren’t afraid of losing what they have because they don’t have much.
A generation of young people who can watch the carnage as it happens via uploads to social media directly from the phone of the person videoing the event. The police violence, the racist slurs, the killing of unarmed citizens, the bombing of hospitals and schools. These young people are seeing events that have not run through the filters of the corporate media.
And this generation is seeking authenticity in their leaders. They don’t feel the need that their parents felt to conform, to play along to get along. They have mountains of college loan debt, they see the impossibility of ever earning enough money to buy a home, they are living with roommates well into their 30’s as the rent is “too damn high.” They are working several gig jobs, with no guarantee of continued employment and no healthcare.
What do they have to lose? Some will turn to suicide, or escape through substance abuse. Have mercy for those who make such choices, for it is becoming more and more rare that people have the family and societal help that they need when experiencing a crisis. So many of us are working multiple jobs just to stay housed and fed.
But other young people will realize that they have the privilege of finding their voices and speaking up:
The shape of student activism on college campuses has changed; the struggle for Palestine is no longer confined to Arab and Muslim students. To be sure, the movement historically did attract progressive Jewish students, but the movement was composed largely of Arabs and Muslims.
In recent years, American youth have been moving away from Democratic Party politics, instead embracing Third-World-style progressiveness. Furthermore, the Black Lives Matter movement has adopted Palestine as one of its causes and that supplied the Palestinian movement with a current of local domestic radicalism. https://consortiumnews.com/2023/12/13/asad-abukhalil-zionism-has-lost-young-america/
Change is coming. It has to. More and more people are seeing through the lies.
“Primary bonds once severed cannot be mended; once paradise is lost, man cannot return to it. There is only one possible, productive solution for the relationship of individualized man with the world: his active solidarity with all men and his spontaneous activity, love and work, which unite him again with the world, not by primary ties but as a free and independent individual.”
― Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom